That's a way to do it. You can also use the BACKUP command to do warm backups (with the service still running). You can schedule this using the AT command and the OSQL utility, which runs SQL commands from the commandline.

You rarely ever need to stop the SQL Server service to take a backup, I guess you are doing it because you cant copy the .mdf files while they are in use (by SQL Server). If you use the built-in backup functionality, you dont need to stop the service.